Our Wednesday News Analysis | To confront Zionism and Western imperialism, history must be rewritten: Palestine is owed its own Balfour Declaration

[photo credit: Getty Images]

This is why serious diplomacy in the coming phase, after a Gaza ceasefire, must go where no mediators and diplomats have ever ventured to go before:

grasp and resolve the root causes of Israel's occupation of Palestine and the Arab-Israeli conflicts.

These include three related elements that are not easy to resolve,
but are essential to resolve if our region is ever to enjoy everyday life.

The three are:

1) ending Western colonial/imperial manipulation of people and lands
in the Middle East,

2) defining and containing Zionism/Israel
to end their regional colonial expansions and wars; and,

3) mustering global support for equal and simultaneous rights
of both Israelis and Palestinians to enjoy
self-determination, statehood, security, and sovereignty in historic Palestine.

"We can pinpoint the start of the colonial assault on Palestinian Arab rights to the Balfour Declaration. This is why we need a new, more ethical declaration that affirms equality and justice for all," argues Rami Khouri.

The ceasefire that halted the US-Israel attack on Iran unleashed major new political and strategic dynamics that potentially impact core actors and conflicts across the Middle East, including this week’s new American ceasefire initiative to halt the US-Israeli genocidal assault on Gaza and the rest of Palestine.

But all the new power dynamics and ceasefire ideas will get us nowhere if they continue to ignore the foundations of the past century of nonstop warfare, colonialism, and resistance. It is time to explore dramatic new ways to resolve Israel's occupation of Palestine and reverse the trend of more wars across the region.

As the US and Israel now exploit their sense of dominance in the region to achieve their most elusive goal of subduing Palestine, the focus now is on three objectives: urgently achieve a ceasefire and resume humanitarian aid in Gaza, launch a credible post-war governance and reconstruction process in occupied Palestine, and explore wider Israeli-Arab negotiations for a permanent peace agreement. The latter would credibly expand the now delusional Abrahamic Accords into a genuine regional economic and developmental boom...

Read more: To confront Zionism and Western imperialism, history must be rewritten: Palestine is owed its own Balfour Declaration

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ZIONIST IMPUNITY CHALLENGES STATES TO ACT DECISIVELY TO HALT GENOCIDE AND ETHNIC CLEANSING

Source: Palestine Chronicle
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/zionist-impunity-challenges-states-to-act-decisively-to-halt-genocide-and-ethnic-cleansing/

By Iqbal Jassat
Published July 12, 2025

We are reminded by media coverage, despite Israel’s military embargo and denial of journalists’ entry to Gaza, that the masses of the population are trapped in the confines of the Strip.

Israel continued to carry out massacres in Gaza. (Photo: Jehad Abu Shamala, via Eye on Palestine)

“This is part of a deliberate policy that reflects a genocidal process by Israel to uproot the people and erase their physical and demographic presence through

mass killing, forced displacement, starvation, and systematic destruction of life.”

While the world’s attention is fixed on the outrageous daily rituals by bloodthirsty Israelis committing hideous massacres in Gaza, concurrently, the Zionist regime has also intensified its unlawful and violent ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank.

Since the beginning of this year, Israeli occupation forces and settler militias have carried out close to 12,000 assaults against Palestinian citizens and their properties.

According to stats recorded by Palestinian sources, Israel grabbed more than 800 dunums (197 acres) of Palestinian land under various pretexts, issuing 36 orders for land seizure for military purposes and one order for land expropriation under the pretext of road construction and expansion.

Press TV quotes a source saying that “the majority of these demolition orders were concentrated in the following governorates: Al-Khalil with 145 orders, Ramallah with 131, Qalqilya with 49, and Ariha with 46″.

Though the statistics fail to capture the human tragedy unfolding in occupied Palestine, the reality is that Palestinians have been subject to such vile conduct by the occupying regime ever since the Nakba of 1948.

Between 1947 and 1949, Zionist military forces attacked major Palestinian cities and destroyed some 530 villages. About 15,000 Palestinians were killed in a series of mass atrocities, including dozens of massacres.

In his book titled “The Atlas of Palestine”, Palestine’s foremost historian and researcher, Salman Abu Sitta, has documented detailed records of what happened to these 530 villages.

Indisputable evidence has led many human rights organisations, including the Human Rights Watch (HRW), to accuse Israel of “committing the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution against Palestinians”...

Read more: Zionist Impunity Challenges States to Act Decisively to Halt Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing
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WHY DO EVANGELICAL PROTESTANTS HATE PALESTINIANS?

Source: Middle East Eye
https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/evangelical-protestants-hate-palestinians-why

By Joseph Massad
Published July 15, 2025

A banner featuring US President Donald Trump and US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee in central Jerusalem, 7 May 2025 (Ahmad Gharabli/AFP)

Huckabee's conviction that God is on the side of Israel is one he shares with most evangelical Christians.

He argues that Israelis did not win their wars of conquest
against Palestinians and neighbouring Arabs
"because they had superior military, artillery capacity, or air power."

Not at all: "They won them because they fought as if they knew that if they lost, they didn't lose some real estate," but rather
"the land that God had given them 3,500 years ago.

Because they did, I am convinced that God, Himself, intervened on behalf of His people in His land", he proclaims.

At a dinner hosted by the Israel Heritage Foundation, Huckabee affirmed to his audience that his support for Israel is grounded in faith:
"We believe that we put our knee to God. We didn't create Him; He created us. And we are obligated to follow His law rather than to invite Him to follow some law that we have foolishly created for ourselves."

Huckabee's support for Israel has embarrassed
even many of its staunchest backers in the US.

Since April 2025, Mike Huckabee, a white evangelical American Protestant and Baptist minister, has served as the US ambassador to Israel.

A right-wing religious fanatic and former Republican presidential candidate, Huckabee previously served as governor of Arkansas.

He believes, as part of his Protestant zealotry, that "there is no such thing as a Palestinian", and that Palestinian identity is merely "a political tool to try and force land away from Israel".

Most recently, the ambassador described Palestinians in Gaza as "wicked, uncivilised savages" - in keeping with the tradition of missionaries, colonists and other "civilising" forces.

Huckabee opposes Palestinian statehood and dismisses Israeli settler-colonialism on Palestinian land as nothing more than urban development.

Countering even Israeli claims that what Jewish colonists build on stolen land are "settlements", Huckabee insists they are simply "communities", "neighbourhoods" and "cities"...

Read more: Why do evangelical Protestants hate Palestinians?